Walking in circles

Page Tools

Monotonous regularity is a means to an end in
unrelenting acts by this Melbourne Festival-bound British duo,
writes Stephanie Bunbury.

AS ART materials go, says Lone Twin's Gregg Whelan, walking
certainly comes cheap. When he and Gary Winters began working on
their performance together at art school in Britain, that was
certainly an attraction.

"Initially, I suppose we were interested in walking because
we're interested in place and context," he says. "But it is also
the most accessible thing. It's to hand. It's free. It's
cheap."

When they graduated, they had no money, no work and nowhere to
work if they had it. "But you can create that work," Winters chips
in, "by creating your own space." Any space is yours if you walk
it.

A decade on, Lone Twin's lugubriously playful performances still
revolve around small-scale travel. Sometimes, that scale is very
small indeed: on one occasion, they made a quarter-hour walk across
a town in Norway last for several days by dragging a telegraph pole
with them.

When I see them at an arts festival in fields surrounding an
ancient church in Suffolk, not far from where Winters grew up, he
simply walks in circles for two hours. Occasionally, he waves his
arms or wiggles and he grows visibly exhausted, while Whelan tells
stories and intones aphorisms that dance around ideas of endurance
and the physical intersections between sweating, creaking humans
and the world in which they find themselves.

In a grand finale, the whole audience gathers outside to see
Winters take off about a dozen layers of thermal clothing: he has
been cooking in there. Then we chuck water over him in order, as
Whelan cries like some P.T. Barnum's charlatan, to create our own
cloud. It is an idea that came, literally, by dint of their own
sweat.

It was at a time when they began worrying that they were too
caught up in an urban idiom, largely because they were working in
hip galleries, when they had actually grown up in the country. "We
started thinking about our bodies sweating," says Winters, "and we
thought we were more like the weather than we were like office
blocks and fax machines and Starbucks. We are more liquid than
solid. That's why we're interested in inserting ourselves into the
weather system. You can billow these great sweat steam clouds,
which is a very nice ending to what we do."

"Watery selves" will be the focus of one of four pieces Lone
Twin will bring to the Melbourne International Arts Festival in
October. Expect to see a couple of oddballs in waders and funny
hats fetching their own weight in water from the Yarra to throw
over themselves at the end of the journey. Cloud creation, they
have realised, will have a particular piquancy in Australia.

As for their other planned performances, do not be surprised to
find a couple of blokes in blindfolds and western gear line-dancing
for 12 hours straight. Likewise, if you see a couple of eccentric
cyclists in full lycra pedalling around, chatting to motorists at
stoplights, you can be pretty certain that's Lone Twin up to their
tricks.

The cycling performance To the Dogs culminates each night
in a short session when they pedal into their allotted space to
recount the adventures of the day - "stories of a city at work,
rest and play, stories of the brave, the humble and the puncture
repair kit", as their press kit puts it.

Whelan and Winters are clearly uncomfortable talking about their
journeys as feats of endurance; that sounds altogether too macho
for a couple of questing hobbits like them. Their cowboy outfits
for Ghost Dance are a bit of a joke; they hardly look like
frontier heroes in their blindfolds, losing track of the dance's
sequence.

They certainly don't train. "I think we are still kind of
interested in the everyday body approaching these tasks," says
Whelan.

The physicality of their work is, however, crucial. "When we
cycle," says Winters, "we don't really talk about what we're going
to say in the performance in the evening. We're going really fast
and we're just cycling. But it's like a motor that drives the mind
as well. It allows you to think, plan and create."

To line-dance for 12 hours is also clearly gruelling, one of the
most compelling aspects of the piece. "People see it at various
times of day, or catch up with it on their lunch break, go to work
and think about it and come back," says Whelan.

"People dance with us; there is no instruction for them to
dance, but they do. Sometimes they will come back and tell us they
tried to go to bed, but couldn't because they were wondering
whether we were still dancing." People frequently cry as it draws
to an end at midnight. "It moves people."

But it is the fact of sensation itself, rather than the
painfulness of that sensation, that is at the performance's core.
"When people have problems with Ghost Dance, we sometimes
say, 'Well, we find out how 12 hours feel'," says Whelan. "What
does it mean to live through 12 hours, albeit under those very
specific conditions?"

He compares it to walking Broadway, a name that conjures an
entire culture, but that is also a street with a specific length
and gradient. "So you can get to know it, physically, just by
walking it. For those of us who are interested in live presences in
art, in the body doing something in front of you, walking becomes
this very clear, uncluttered engagement with those things."

Recently, the Lone Twin lads have been getting increasingly
interested in telling stories.

They found that people tended to invest their movements with
stories anyway, inventing narratives to fit the random turns of
Ghost Dance, for example, but they also realised how much of
their work depended on the chance encounters they had while
performing and travelling.

"A lot of our work, to some degree, is a kind of catalyst to
make other things happen," says Whelan.

"We've made pieces that are really just about trying to get
other people to walk with us around the street. We realised as we
were constructing those pieces that we were constructing these tiny
narratives - that even things that appeared not to have a narrative
were built from these tiny exchanges, which become stories, you
know."

They refined the process when they were commissioned to write a
television program for two to three-year-old children, largely
consisting of stories that lasted no more than a few minutes.

"They became structural games in a way, because you can't deal
with cultural references or historical information. Anything new
that appears you have to explain. It makes you think, really deeply
and seriously, about how to construct a story."

The direct result of this mulling is that Whelan and Winters are
now writing a theatre piece, to be performed by four or five
actors. They are very conscious, however, of keeping it cheap. The
necessaries for all their performances fit into a rucksack.

"We don't suddenly want to have seven people on the road and
become really expensive," says Winters anxiously. "But there will
be no set. No freight."

They will still be mobile. They would hardly be Lone Twin if
they weren't.

Lone Twin will perform Ghost Dance, The
Days of the Sledgehammer Have Gone, To the Dogs and the
Walk with Me Lecture at the Melbourne Festival between
October 9 and 20. Check
melbournefestival.com.au for dates.